Call to Action for Energy Democracy

I just endorsed Solar Done Right's Call to Action for Energy Democracy

We must take rapid, effective, innovative action to change the ways we generate and use energy;

Renewable energy is ubiquitous, offering a new model of energy generation that is local, democratic, and free from the abuses of a centralized monopoly;

The US government’s current renewable-energy policy and the policies of most US states push industrial solar and wind development onto public lands;

This industrial development is proposed for hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of acres of our public lands—much of that acreage consisting of intact ecosystems which provide habitat for rare and endangered plants and animals, sequester carbon, and offer the chance for ecosystem adaptation to climate change;

The utility-scale solar and wind generating plants now proposed, most with footprints of several thousand acres, would transform these ecologically-rich, multiple-use lands to single use industrial facilities, in effect privatizing vast areas of public lands;

Once developed, those lands cannot be returned to their previous state after the life of a project – conversion is total and permanent, even though most such projects will generate power for only 15 to 30 years;

The thousands of miles of new transmission infrastructure necessary to carry power from remote solar and wind electric generating plants to urban demand centers drastically inflates the cost of renewable energy, while imposing its own serious environmental impacts;

The federal government has provided tens of billions of taxpayer dollars in cash grants, loans and loan guarantees for remote industrial-scale solar and wind development to many of the same corporations that have dominated the Fossil Fuel Era, created the problems renewable energy is designed to rectify, and helped hasten the recession, while states and local governments have incurred substantial costs to expedite these for-profit projects;

Efficiency upgrades and “distributed generation”—point-of-use energy generation on rooftops, in parking lots and highway medians, brownfields, and throughout the built environment—are cost-effective, efficient, clean, and democratic strategies that are quick to implement, and would serve communities, ratepayers, and taxpayers by improving local economies and adding to home values, and creating millions of local jobs;

Efficiency and distributed generation further have far less environmental impact than industrial scale solar or wind power on intact ecosystems, while making our electrical power grid far less prone to catastrophic failure;

Feed-In Tariffs (FITs) and true net metering programs, in which utilities purchase democratically produced, decentralized renewable energy at a fair price, have been proven a cost-effective way of stimulating rapid deployment of local solar and other distributed generation, while providing economic stimulus to communities rather than multinational corporations, even in cloudy countries like Germany;

The Environmental Protection Agency's “Re-Powering America’s Lands” program has identified 15 million acres of degraded or contaminated land potentially suitable for renewable energy development, and is committed to working with renewable energy developers to remediate these lands for use as utility-scale renewable energy generation sites where large projects may be desirable.

THEREFORE, WE DEMAND:

That the Federal and state governments abandon their current path of industrialization and destruction of our public lands;

That any large-scale solar or wind installations be restricted to degraded, contaminated, or already-developed lands, including those identified by the EPA;

That Federal, state, and local governments facilitate a massive deployment of efficiency
upgrades and point-of-use solar power;

That no new large, long-distance electrical transmission projects be approved to serve remote solar or wind projects until distributed power generation and energy efficiency are maximized;

That Federal and state funding and other incentives be made available to help states establish and expand generous Feed in Tariffs (FITs) modeled after successful programs like Germany’s, and improve net metering policies, and that Congress work to establish the proven solutions of German-style FITs and less-restrictive net metering at a national scale.
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